Religious Switching Analysis

Religious switching analysis studies how people move between religious traditions over their lives by comparing the religion they were raised in with the one they hold as adults. Its central tool is the origin-by-destination transition matrix, whose rows are childhood traditions and whose entries give the probability of ending up in each adult tradition; the diagonal gives retention, the off-diagonals give defection and recruitment, and summing across rows yields each group's net gains and losses. Darren Sherkat's Changing Faith (2014) used large national datasets to map the dynamics and consequences of Americans' shifting identities, and the Pew Research Center's 2015 religious-switching findings quantified how Catholicism and mainline Protestantism lose members while the religiously unaffiliated gain - making switching a primary engine of change in the American religious landscape.